How Trump's Second Year Can Top His First

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President Donald Trump had a big job ahead of him when he took the oath of office in January 2017: reinvigorating Barack Obama’s slow-growing economy, rolling back Obama’s regulatory steamroller, improving national security, and “draining the swap.” The good news is Trump has made a lot of progress — a lot more than many expected. Now the question is whether his second year can top his first.

It’s possible. Here’s how.

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The regulatory rollback

Obama may not have been very successful at pushing his legislative agenda through Congress, but he was an overachiever when it came to pushing regulations.

Wayne Crews of the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute calls Trump “the least regulatory president since Reagan.” He notes that in Barack Obama’s last year in office, 2016, he set a record for new pages of regulations in the Federal Register: 97,110.

As of Oct. 1 — two-thirds through the year — the Trump administration had only added 45,678.

The importance of the Trump regulatory rollback cannot be overemphasized, because regulations come with a price. Crews estimates “the baseline for the U.S. federal regulatory burden has amounted to nearly $2 trillion annually. This amounts to a hidden tax of nearly $15,000 per household in a given year.”